The Promise: A Novel of China and Burma (Oriental Novels of Pearl S. Buck) by Buck Pearl S

Author:Buck, Pearl S. [Buck, Pearl S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781453267448
Publisher: Moyer Bell and its subsidiaries
Published: 2012-08-20T14:00:00+00:00

XII

THE GENERAL WAS UNEASY and the more because for many days he had not been able to ask the Chairman for advice. The small radio set he had brought to Burma was broken beyond mending. So one day he called Pao-Chen to him and he said, “Write something which will move the Chairman’s heart and make him see what he asks us to do. Tell him the radio machine broke itself and I have no way of hearing his commands. Tell him I am not afraid. Tell him I will fight where he tells me to fight, but in the name of all our people, tell him to give me freedom to fight our own war and not go into battle tied to an ally who retreats before we can get there. Ask him if we shall go in when Rangoon is already doomed. Tell him it is he who must decide and not I, whether these, our best troops, are to be lost in the jungles trying to save the white men, or whether we shall fight for our own reasons. Put your strength into words, Chen, and let them eat their way through the paper. Tell him the white men will not let us buy rice. Ask him where the American is. Tell him we sit here on our tails like treed monkeys, waiting while the enemy takes what he will. Nearly sixty thousand of the enemy are in the wilderness on the border of Thailand, ready to attack. That wilderness is the harshest battlefield in the world, and are we to fight upon it, not to defend our homeland but to hold the empire for the white men? Tell him twenty thousand of the enemy are just over the other border of Thailand and between the two enemy armies is a vanguard of their men. The Shan mountains lie there and their tops rise six thousand feet and their valleys are full of jungles. That is our battlefield, tell him. Tell him our spies say the white men are leaving the oil fields untouched—nothing destroyed, or so slightly destroyed that a few months will give them to the enemy, a few weeks, even. Tell him—”

Pao Chen’s pen was rushing across the paper, and the sweat was pouring down his face.

“Make it as black as you can and you cannot make it black enough,” the General said passionately.

“I make it black,” Pao Chen muttered.

In silence the two sat for a while, and the only sound in silence was Pao Chen’s foreign pen, scratching out the bold characters.

“Shall I read it?” he asked when he was through to the end of his paper.

“Read it,” the General replied.

He sat with his head in his hands to listen, but at that moment the door opened and a seventeenth spy came running in. His garments were torn and his feet bleeding, and he had been wounded in his left hand and he had wrapped it in a sleeve torn from his coat.

“Rangoon!” he gasped.

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